SOURCE: Doherty, Gerald. “The Art of Confessing: Silence and Secrecy in James Joyce's ‘The Sisters.’” James Joyce Quarterly 35, no. 4 (summer 1998): 657-64.

In the following essay, Doherty analyzes the place of secrecy in the text and meaning of Joyce's story, “The Sisters.”

In Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault situates the act of confessing within a long European perspective.¹ He traces its slow evolution from those “naked” questions, formulated by the confession manuals of the Middle Ages, through the Catholic pastorals of the Counter-Reformation, down to its modern reincarnation in the secular disciplines of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In this evolution, as Foucault remarks, western man becomes a confessing animal, who compulsively narrates to himself (or another) his moral or social transgressions and who transforms the least of his desires into discourse (20-21). Confession turns both on what can be openly spoken about and what it is forbidden...